John owned a distribution company, and he was the entire sales department. Every major deal ran through him. Every key relationship lived in his phone. He was missing his daughter’s dance recitals. His wife said he was never home.

Difficult decisions don’t end once you’ve made them. The biggest challenges come with execution risk. Does your decision get carried out the way you wanted it to? The key to successful execution is good change management.

Who makes the better call: a manager with a wide-ranging career or a narrow one; a doctor who trusts their instincts, or one who sticks to clinical guidelines; a human recruiter, or an algorithm that assesses job candidates?

When the Covid-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, all the dithering about remote work stopped virtually overnight. Working from home wasn’t perfect, but people made it work.

M ore than 80% of restructuring efforts in firms fail. Most explanations focus on poor execution or bad strategy.

On a Tuesday morning, a support agent in Dublin closes a tricky ticket while an engineer in Bengaluru ships a fix, and a sales manager in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, joins a customer call spanning four time zones.

A problem shows up, and the fix usually arrives five minutes later.

“We need more training.”

“We need a better system.”

“We need another person.”

“We need a new checklist.”

People pitch ideas all the time. Most of those pitches never get heard. Why? Because they don’t consider the audience.

In my earlier writing, I’ve leaned on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ladder.

When former United States secretary of state Madeleine Albright said, “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other,” that quip captured a widespread expectation that women who reach the top should pull others up behind them.